Unfortunately, as you're keenly aware, the software development industry has a tendency to attempt to reinvent itself every few years. It might stop eventually.

For the specific problem of python, consider using 2to3.py to catch most problems (it'll fix up minor API changes and the like). It might help :)

Although being pessimistic about technology is my pass time, I'd imagine that breaking backwards compatibility is not done for business purposes. Two points of data on that line of reasoning: 1. C has a number of active, popular compilers (gcc, clang and msvcc, but I haven't kept up) which keeps maintainers from individually removing _too_ much functionality -- it's typically a poor business decision to remove compatibility bullet points from your product. Python (excluding pypy since it makes the typically poor business decision to remove compatibility bullet points) and F# are single-major implementation languages, giving them a fair bit more freedom to experiment. 2. Off the top of my head, Java and C# have compatibility going back many, many years. Considering that they've huge corporate backers that would have a lot of incentive to deprecate functionality continuously, that seems a good counterexample. A point could be made regarding feature addition rather than subtraction, but similarly that applies to C++ ...